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Twitter is nowadays a powerful means of political propaganda. Its effectiveness can be easily appreciated in the large amounts of messages exchanged by politicians every day. This wealth of data, together with the interactive nature of the social medium, provides an ideal basis for the analysis of a striking feature of political messages, i.e., their implicitness, often achieved using presuppositions, among other strategies. The present work proposes a comparative analysis of British and Italian politicians' use of Twitter by focusing on implicit communication (notably, presuppositions) and the pragmatic functions of tweets. Based on a sample of about 400 tweets, our analysis shows that some of these functions tend to associate either with presuppositional or non-presuppositional communicative devices. Moreover, a critical methodological discussion is offered in order to address the main challenges of quantitative corpus-based pragmatics.

In this paper, we pursue two main (interconnected) goals, relying on a comparable and parallel corpus of French and Italian cleft sentences. First, we assess the most typical formal and functional properties of clefts in these languages, while also considering variation due to the different types of data. Second, we verify the presence of interference in the translation of clefts from French into Italian. Translators’ choices mostly align with information-structural patterns found in original Italian texts, but word-for-word translation styles can increase the frequency of less-common cleft types in Italian, such as Broad Focus and Information Focus clefts. However, odd or infelicitous pragmatic effects arise only in very few cases.

This paper offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of French and Italian wh-in situ questions based on spontaneous spoken data. A pragmatic analysis relying on two parameters, propositional activation and pragmatic functions, reveals that the licensing conditions and the use of this structure largely differ in the two languages. While French wh-in situ do not require an activated proposition and can introduce a discourse-new topic, Italian wh-in situ mostly require an activated proposition and, at least in the analyzed corpus data, do not introduce discourse-new topics. An examination of the context also reveals that the different licensing conditions influence the interactional uses of these questions. All in all, both French and Italian wh-in situ require a pragmatic condition, which is their ‘anchoring’ to given, or at least inferable, information in the linguistic context (as is typical of Italian) or to predictable situations in the extralinguistic context (such as expected discourse moves in social interactions, as is the case for French).

The goal of the paper is to shed new light on the semantics and pragmatics of cleft sentences by discussing the exhaustive interpretation typically associated with these complex syntactic structures. Based on a fine grained analysis of the contexts in which “exhaustiveness” can be cancelled as well as reinforced by English also and only and Italian anche and solo we claim that this meaning component associated with clefts in English and Italian is best accounted for in terms of a conventionalized conversational implicature. Our analysis is based on a corpus of authentic cleft occurrences collected from different written sources. Keywords: cleft sentences exhaustiveness conversational implicature contrastive analysis English Italian corpus study

Questo volume persegue un triplice obiettivo. In primo luogo, si descrivono le proprieta distribuzionali, formali e funzionali dei costrutti di sintassi marcata dell’italiano dell’uso medio alla luce del loro impiego nella scrittura dei quotidiani online, un tipo di testo ancora poco noto. In secondo luogo, si identificano le proprieta che caratterizzano tali costrutti in un contesto europeo, vale a dire rispetto alle proprieta delle stesse (o analoghe) strutture in francese, spagnolo, tedesco e inglese. Questa scelta si giustifica con il fatto che il confronto interlinguistico permette di raggiungere il terzo obiettivo della presente ricerca: collocare l’italiano in un quadro tipologico romanzo e, piu generalmente, europeo.

The paper suggests that there is no contradiction in cleft sentences focalizing information which was already introduced by the preceding context, because being already active in discourse (i.e., Given) is not the same as being linguistically encoded as a Topic, and Given information can be focalized in discourse. Clefts should be explained precisely as constructions devoted mainly to focalizing already active information. A side-effect of the analysis is to assess that the role of syntax in expressing Information Structure is a secondary one, because syntactic triggers of Information Structure only work when accompanied by prosodic triggers, whereas prosodic means can work alone.